My last article examined human nature and argued, through reasoning and experience, that we, at core, are thought-energy-will. That is how we animate our bodies and how we move through the field of matter.

Thought-energy-will in the form of “I” is an individual, a little spark that woke up within the infinity of intelligent potential that some physicists like to call “the unified field.” We are each pieces of the Infinite, totally connected with the Infinite, yet independent as doers and experiencers. As individualized expressions of thought-energy-will, we are the way the Infinite expresses itself, the way it creates. We are the reason for creation. Our individuality is precious to the Infinite, and if we ever dissolved that, we would defeat the purpose of life.

The part of my being that makes me individual is my unique thought and will. The will is the impulse within me to do and to choose and to create. What I do, choose, and create is unique in all the universe. No other impulse of the Infinite (no other individual) will ever or can ever observe life from quite my perspective, nor will they ever do or allow or create exactly as I choose to.

Our choices and inspirations are based on our positions where we stand as an individualized sparks of infinity. When all the sparks know their nature as the Infinite and at the same time fully engage their individuality, the world will become like a symphony, with every note sounded full and sweet, harmonizing with and adding to every other note. It will become a colorful flower field, every blossom vibrant in its distinct and separate uniqueness, yet each contributing to the perfume and beauty that is all the flower field together.

Religion works against this. It tells us to surrender our will to something greater, but the Infinite actually delights in our will and its expression. Religion tells us to dissolve our ego – the author of our doing, creating, and choosing – into the cosmic ego of the whole. This is completely counter to the purpose of the Infinite. It would be like every flower in a garden surrendering itself to the garden, wilting in its self-hood instead of being the best flower it can be. The entire garden would die.

Each person is an individualized expression of thought-energy-will – like a car and driver, moving across the universe. Mind is the automobile, energy is the fuel, and will is the driver. Telling me to surrender my will is a way of taking over my thought and my energy.

The car goes nowhere without a will to drive it. If I step out of the driver’s seat of my life, merely reacting to the world instead of initiating things in it, someone else will climb behind the wheel and direct where I go. This is especially true if I invite such an arrangement through self-deprecating prayer or by prostrating myself before the gods in mantra meditation.

When we dissolve our will or ego, “I” no longer exists. All that remains is the shell of what was once a person. We are left with body (energy) and mind (thoughts). The lights are on, but no one’s at home. Or rather, someone new has taken up residence, the entity to whom one has surrendered one’s ego or will. Some call this enlightenment. It’s actually possession. The will has been abdicated, that which makes us uniquely human. One becomes a vessel for the will of that to whom one has given oneself.

Decades back, when I was a girl, religion outright asked for surrender of the will. That’s back when will was talked about still in common parlance. Now, religion has evolved and asks instead for surrender of our ego. But will and ego are the same thing. By demonizing our desires, by telling us ego is arrogant and selfish, religion has made the will seem like something that must be relinquished for perfection or goodness to be attained.

In fact, when we surrender that spark, through “namah-ing”our way through years of mantras or asking Jesus to save us, the very reason for our existence is defeated. We become empty shells, sounding to the noise of that which blows through us and possesses us. That entity is not God, for True God is the Infinite which never wants to take over anything. God desires its children’s freedom, their will unfettered, so they may dance wherever and however they like, and in so doing, delight their creator.

When we truly get that we are thought-energy-will in our essential nature, that this impulse is our spirit, the eternal and infinite personhood that animates our body, then it becomes possible to command the body and control it. We understand that every physical limitation is a limitation of thought, and that thought can reverse it. If all matter, including our bodies, is made of nothing but energy, then by thinking our physical energy patterns different, they must change. We’ve accepted that we must age and die, and so we do. But if we decide to reject that thought and supplant it with a better one, we can order the body to thrive and to live forever.

This is why I went into such detail in my last article examining what we are at our core. Because unless we intuitively get that, unless it’s something we’ve reasoned to ourselves, so thoroughly and deeply that it becomes our essential reality, then the idea that we are thought-energy-will pulsing in an infinite field of potential is only a pretty concept. It must become our most fundamental experience. When our true nature becomes as clear and real to us as the ground we walk on, we can start to live from that reality, with the authority that understanding grants us. We can ordain things and they happen. We can tell the body to do what we will. We can infuse the body with the infinite energy of the unified field and never need to eat (take life from others) in order to survive. We can survive on our essential, infinite nature.

And if all beings learned to do this, if all egos understood their essential power and immortality, no one would need to feed on anyone else. We all would exist in our own self-empowerment. The basic premise on which this universe is founded would dissolve, and that premise is the need to take life from others in order to live. The universe would start to operate on a different principle, the principle of its essential unlimited potential.

Let’s look at this from another perspective. Jewish mystical texts, as well as other esoteric manuscripts, describe the shape of the universe as a torus. A torus looks like a doughnut, a doughnut capable of turning in on itself. Think of it like a piece of vacuum cleaner tubing, taped to itself to form a circle, a doughnut shape. Imagine rotating the tubing, so the part that is the top moves toward the center, then down to the bottom, then back up to the top again. That is the description of a torus.

In this model, the universe is a black hole on one of the sides of the torus, a white hole at the other side. The white hole is constantly spitting out new creations – new worlds – that live, thrive, then decline as they move around the outside to the reverse side of the torus, where they are absorbed by the black hole there. (Astronomy now actually postulates that there is a black hole in the center of the universe, toward which all galaxies are constantly moving.) As they move through the center of the doughnut, worlds are destroyed then recycled, emerging on the other side of the torus – through the white hole – as new forms. Individual forms have been consumed; new forms have been created. And so the cycle of creation and destruction continues.

This torus is the physical shape of the universe, according to mystic sources, and the shape resembles that of someone eating, digesting, and defecating. Food in (at the black hole end), food processed (interior of the doughnut hole), food out (at the white hole end). In this way, the torus that is the universe resembles the interior shape of human and animal bodies: mouth at one end, digestion and transmutation of food in the center, anus at the other end. And just as animals defecate, their feces fertilizing the earth and becoming new plants, that which was defecated gets consumed again in the form of a new dinner. This torus system is the pattern or shape of the universe we live in. And it is our essential shape as organic beings, as long as we are eaters, dependent on taking life to survive.

The torus also appears to be the shape of Brahman, the Vedic/ East Indian name for the entity or consciousness that is or upholds the universe. Brahman is another name, in India, for the cosmic Self. It is that consciousness which those pursuing the traditional concept of “enlightenment” are striving to attain. Brahman functions in a self-destructive feedback loop. “Curving back onto myself, I create again and again,” says Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, speaking for the consciousness of the universe. Energy in, energy out. Galaxies dissolved, galaxies created. An endless cycle of creation and destruction. The universe is like a dog forever chasing its tail.

The ancient mystery schools depicted the reality of the universe another way: through the symbol of a snake swallowing its tail. (Picture a dot on the torus, and the path it takes as it moves from the top inner side down the outer side, across the bottom, up the inner side and back to its position on the top. It makes a perfect circle, which is the shape of a snake swallowing its tail.) The symbol is one of self-destruction, because a snake that devours itself will die. The universe will also someday die, because it cannot go on eating itself endlessly. In time its energy will wear out, from the endless recycling project. The universe will implode.

Brahman (the consciousness whose outer form is our universe) knows this, and it is terrified. That’s why all its children are terrified. All beings are afraid of death, and are subject to death. Because the great entity we are part of, the universe, is subject to death. Like Brahman, the great torus, we little toruses must eat to continue our existence. Or so we think. But in fact, we are no more in need of consuming others to continue existing than a dog needs to chase its tail in order to stay alive. It’s a thought we had that became a belief. It’s a thought Brahman had, that became a belief. And what we think, we manifest as reality.

The universe is self-destructive because it thinks that way. Brahman eats its children because it thinks it has to, to survive. Brahman is an insane parent, pursuing a course that is madness, knowing no other. But healing is only a thought away. Brahman only needs to conceive of another possibility, and it can change its pattern of existence.

In fact, Brahman, like us, is an individualized expression of the unified field: pure and infinite intelligent energy. If Brahman could but remember its nature as infinite, it would stop trying to eat itself. It eats itself in an effort to consume energy, because it thinks it will run out. But its very nature is thought-energy-will, and the energy it expresses from is infinite. By remembering that, Brahman would no longer need to consume itself to stay alive. It can simply shine in its own self-effulgence. It can bask in its own infinity of energy, and dance an endless dance in the forms of its immortal children. The insanity can end, when the insane thinking ends.

We are children of Brahman, and we also ARE Brahman, as a leaf is an individual but is also the plant it is part of, as a cell is an individual, but also the body it is part of. If the leaves change their minds, the plant changes its mind. If we, as children of the universe, wake up to our essential nature as unlimited and undying, then Brahman, our parent, must wake up to the same. If we stop needing to consume and stop agreeing to be consumed, consumption stops – not only for us, but for that which we are a part of. The universe starts to change its mind with every one of us that changes our mind.

When enough people wake up to our limitless nature, Brahman will wake up, and the torus that is the universe will morph into a new shape. The insanity will end, and the dog will stop chasing its tail. The need for anyone to devour anyone else will cease, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. It all starts with remembering what we really are, then using our wills to ordain change from that infinite, powerful place.

The definition of religion is from the root “religio,” which means “to bind back.” Think of the torus that is Brahman as a great firework explosion, where the sparks reach outward, then curve back to their source. Religion gives us the thinking that binds us back to the hole in the doughnut, where we must be destroyed and recycled.

By seeing through the lies of religion, by refusing to surrender our wills / egos to Brahman or to any other limited entity that religions may call God, we free ourselves from the need to cycle around from birth to ultimate death. We identify with something much greater than Brahman – the infinite intelligence from which Brahman and all universes sprang.

In so doing, we immortalize ourselves, body and spirit. We save ourselves, and we also save the universe. For being its unit members, we are the universe.

Keep in mind that Brahman is not the Ultimate Reality (although people in the Eastern religious traditions will tell you that it is). If Brahman is the cosmic consciousness of this universe, and as such is a limited consciousness (as we have seen), then the Ultimate Reality is beyond Brahman. The Ultimate Reality must be the pure ground of Being, from which all universes emerge, ours being but one of them. Brahman, the entity, thinks it is all there is – the ultimate of the ultimate – but that is not the case. Other universes exist, each with its own overmind or consciousness . Brahman is only one of these, only one of myriad universes.

Surely not every universe – not every cosmic child of God – is insane the way Brahman is. Surely not all of them are ignorant of how to live off the infinite energy they were conceived from. Surely there must be some creations that already exist in a state of eternal paradise. Because all possibilities exist in the Infinite Field that gave birth to all the worlds, and not all of God’s cosmic children can be that dumb!

If living a life free of birth and death is possible – and reason tells us it must be – then we can transform our universe into its own unique paradise. It’s only a matter of stepping out of the rut of old, engrained ideas – the dogmas we hold as unquestionable absolutes – and moving to a new way of perceiving, willing, and being. What a grand challenge and adventure!

Individuality in league with Oneness (not Oneness alone) will win the day and restore human freedom. The gospel of Oneness, all by itself, supports the New World Order. Proponents say it doesn’t matter if the world goes to hell in a hand basket, because after all, this world is an illusion and only Oneness Consciousness is real. If we know that, they argue, it doesn’t matter what happens, because there’s really no happiness or suffering, right or wrong, life or death, good or no bad — only the Oneness. So who cares?

I understand how people caught in the web of Eastern religion and New Age mumbo jumbo come to those conclusions. Their teachers’ purpose is to make them passive, “surrendered to the One,” their ego (personal selfhood) made into the enemy that must be killed. The teachers state it outright: “ego death” is the goal.

But that conspiracy-conscious people can fall into the same plight, instead of raising a cry for freedom and life in this world, came as a shock to me. I realize now it’s because Truth Movement leaders themselves sometimes combine the Oneness Doctrine with their research and information on the conspiracy. These people may have mystical experiences of their own that they trust in the way the religious trust their gurus, never questioning where they came from or why they were given to them.

The assumption seems to be that if it happened in my head and was accompanied by euphoria and fireworks, it must be true, and proof of the nature of the universe. But if the Illuminati extend to realms between visual perception (and evidence indicates they do – see my article series, Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment), the Illuminati could be the source of much of mankind’s mystical experience. It’s easy for beings in the Unseen, adept at thought transference, to implant ideas in the minds of willing seekers, generating chemical changes in their brains and bodies and making them feel like they’ve been kissed by God. This would be particularly easy if the seekers have imbibed hallucinogenic substances.

I believe that well-intentioned, semi-depressed people are being implanted with messages that God has sent them to save the world. The urgency this produces gives their lives a particular sense of meaning. The message they receive is either that there is a war on among the Powers of Light and Darkness, which they must help fight, or that seeing through the illusion called reality and uniting with Infinite Oneness is the end-all and be-all of human existence. Both messages hold enough truth that they appeal to those who receive them as genuine. Both are so flawed as to point the receiver in the wrong direction, toward beliefs that favor humanity handing the universe into the Illuminati’s conniving hands.

The Light and Dark War of Principalities is nothing more than the Good Cop – Bad Cop Game taken to celestial levels. Like the eternal war between the Democrats and Republicans, it is unreal – a smokescreen designed to hide where the real action happens. Lucifer and Jehovah are on the same side: control of humanity. The “gods” and “demons” of Indianism are on the same side. As long as mankind provides the loosh (life energy) to the nether worlds through worship or suffering, all in the Fourth Dimension are happy.

It doesn’t matter if you call for help from Satan or Jesus, Krishna or Kali, you’re aligning your soul with the gang of brigands who have hijacked our lives by controlling us at our most intimate level. This control is not a takeover, but rather, freely given. Worshipers of their own accord give their lives to management by these beings, whom they regard as divine. They think in so doing they fight on the right side in the battle of good against evil. But all they do in fact is supply the life force, the loosh, needed for humanity’s hijackers to continue feeding off our hearts and souls.

Those who surrender their flawed human egos to the Oneness are no different. They, too, give their souls to management by the Fourth Dimension’s united company of tricksters. This is the point so many in the Truth Movement miss. We think that by making Oneness consciousness our supreme goal we are becoming pure. We think by embracing The Doctrine of Oneness we acquire supreme wisdom.

But the doctrine as it is taught today, even as the greatest Indian masters once taught it, is corrupt. The truth has been contaminated by the Fourth Dimension. Because the doctrine teaches that individual ego is a perversion of the Infinite, something that must be dissolved back into the universal consciousness for us to become wholesome and free. As such, that doctrine erodes the integrity of humanity.

It does so because it puts our world’s future up for grabs when it tells us to abdicate personal desire and intention as constructs of the ego. If we regard our individual nature as a corruption of Oneness, we conclude we must negate our ego to know Truth. We abdicate everything about us that makes us aware, decisive, will-exerting doers in this world – in favor of melting into the One, whose cosmic workings are thought to be automatic and perfect once humans remove their will and personality from the equation.

Whether or not the Doctrine of Oneness entails mantras and worship of gods, it is destructive. Because the doctrine is taught at the expense of the personality, the part of us that makes choices, that makes a difference in the world. When ego is taught as something essentially corrupt, or essentially unreal, it ceases to have value for us, and we naturally want to abandon it. This is exactly what the Illuminati desire from us, more than anything else we can give.

When we turn our backs on our ego, on the individual will and personality that is the very spark of the Infinite within us, we set our souls on the freebie shelf of the universe, to be absorbed or manipulated by Fourth Dimension entities. Our acts no longer appear to be our own – they feel like the work of forces moving through us. That perception is correct. But those forces are not the winds of Infinity, as the possessed assume: those forces are the egos of the possessors, who cherish this surrender of human selfhood.

By making the choice to regard all except the Oneness as flawed, unreal or insignificant, we turn over control of this universe to anyone who hasn’t abdicated their authority as a doer. Those are the only players still left on the field. This non-surrendered-ego group includes the Fourth Dimension band of brigands as well as those humans who accept neither the Oneness Doctrine nor the Doctrine of the War of Principalities – in other words, those who respect and retain their personhood and all its attendant faculties of will and desire.

I am not saying that Oneness, the Infinite Oneness that is the source from which we came, that place deep within us where we are all united, does not exist or is not important. It’s of supreme importance. The Infinite is the font of all life, all joy, all inspiration, all creativity. It is that which inspires us. It is pure genius. That Infinite, and our conscious connection with It, holds all the hope for our breaking out of the slavery we have let be visited on us materially and spiritually.

But to say It is the only reality, that everything except for It is a corruption of the Oneness – which is how the Doctrine of Oneness is perpetually preached – that is a perversion of the truth, designed to control us. If the Illuminati, functioning in the field of spiritual teachings, can get us to believe that we as individuals are illusory, that all we really are is the One, we will give up treasuring our will and desires as gifts of the divine, expressions of the Infinite, and throw them onto the waste pile as impure.

From that waste pile, they will be collected by the brigands who are able to use our abandoned will and desiring mechanism to achieve their own desires. When you abandon responsibility for your ego, which never can be destroyed since it is the stuff of consciousness, it is not the Oneness that takes over your personhood and absorbs it, it is other egos. The vulture-like, thieving egos who want to control all beings and bring them into alignment with their will.

When you surrender your ego, it does not dissolve as you have been promised, because the spark that you are can never dissolve. Your ego is either absorbed by the “god” you worship, increasing that entity’s personal power, or, if you do not worship a god, it is absorbed by any passing brigand who happens to notice that it has been abandoned. Ego = personhood = individual soul. This is soul-stealing, by permission.

Why can’t we all just dissolve into the Oneness? Because the Oneness didn’t make us individuals by accident, as some big cosmic mistake. We were created on purpose, as expressions of the joy of the Infinite. Just as a serene artist takes the joy in her heart and turns it into a fountain of expressions, each art piece revealing a unique aspect of her thoughts and nature, so the Infinite made us all unique expressions of aspects of its limitless self. It WANTS to see its oneness made into myriad shapes. It created the universe to be a delight, a mirror story of its own joy and greatness. Instead creation has slid into a nightmare, delight overshadowed by the misery and cruelty that comes of forgetting the nature of our inner being.

The flaws in creation are not because the Infinite individuated, but because its unique expressions – you and me – forgot our deeper nature, forgot the infinite power, bliss, and goodness that only can be located and tapped deep within ourselves in the place where we’re one with the Infinite.

The solution to our suffering is not to surrender our egos to the cosmic freebie shelf/ dump heap under the guise of awakening to Oneness. Rather, it is to bathe our personhood in the purity of the Infinite, to drink deeply of its waters, to melt our cares in its bliss and consciously become again what we are at core: pure molecules within that infinite ocean. From the bath, we return to the world and make it better, more joyful, more free, more inspired. We spontaneously grasp solutions to problems that eluded us before.

After enough bathing in the Infinite, it’s possible to move through this world and act here without ever leaving the consciousness that holds us in that embrace. The world becomes God’s ocean where we splash and cavort. That is God’s dream for the world – not amorphous, static Oneness. The amorphous is where God started from, and God found it boring. That’s why It created diversity, to play in. Because sitting being amorphous – simple Oneness – got dull.

Why would we make being “amorphous” our end-all and be-all, when it was the Infinite’s starting point, the very place it was endeavoring to emerge from in hopes of creating something interesting? Oneness isn’t interesting, it’s blissful. Just being blissful by itself gets old. Bliss needs to express in myriad creations to be fun and dynamic. It needs to desire, intend, make, choose, and act – all functions of ego. To say getting back to the Oneness is the whole point of life is like saying getting back to the first scene of the play is the whole point of the play, or getting back to the starting line is the whole point of the race.

The point is to run the race, play the play, dance the dance – and to do it in a way that retains contact with the consciousness that inspired the endeavor: the Infinite joy and oneness. When we learn to connect with the Oneness without abdicating the beauty and importance of multiplicity (variety), then will the purpose of creation be accomplished.

Then we will know how to dissolve the malignity that afflicts us. We will see that those who wish to control the rest are confused parts of our Greater Self. W won’t wish to destroy them but to help them. Our love, our inmost nature, will forgive and heal them. Then all God’s children will sport on the cosmic playground in laughter together – no more bullies and victims. No more battles and taking sides. No more stopping playing and being amorphous/ withdrawn in some corner. Life will be joy as we have not known it, for from the perspective of Infinity we will learn to dissolve everything that causes suffering here.

That is the divine vision, not destruction of one team on the battlefield, and certainly not the destruction of creation through abdication of personhood. But unless we awaken to the lies in the Doctrine of Oneness, the end of creation is what we promote. When the brand of brigands has consumed every ego in the universe through clever spiritual lies, it will be the proverbial snake that has swallowed its own tail. Creation will implode if that is allowed to happen.

We contribute to cosmic implosion when we accept the Doctrine of Oneness, striving for dissolution of ego into Oneness as our highest goal. The truly highest goal is Oneness expressing in joy in the forms of its myriad children, who make up the infinite garden of the world.

In the book, Tredwell recounts her personal experience in the ashram, where she admits she was complicit in covering up all sorts of ashram secrets, in a misguided attempt to protect the guru’s misdeeds from public view (believing, as all guru cultists do, that the guru is God in human form and therefore exempt from human standards of right and wrong).

Tredwell’s riveting book recounts stories of donations intended for charity being converted into gold jewelry and hidden under the garments of Amma’s sanyasis (monks) as they passed through customs – then the gold being passed to Amma’s family to make them fabulously rich. Tredwell tells of being beaten, clawed, and bitten by Amma, who would succumb to fits of rage over small mistakes made by her attendants. Tredwell speaks of her discovery that, while claiming to be a lifelong celibate, Amma secretly had ongoing sexual affairs with several of her closest swamis (monks who have taken lifelong vows of celibacy).

Tredwell was extensively quoted in an August 2012 Rolling Stone article on Amma regarding some of these allegations. Rolling Stone was able to corroborate the claim of physical abuse by Amma through the testimony of another one of Amma’s female attendants, who would not reveal her name except to the magazine.

Holy Hell can be purchased through Amazon via this link. What follows below is the original article I wrote about Amma for this website, in 2008.

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This is Chapter 9 in an online book: ‘Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment: Confessions of a New Age Heretic,’ by Bronte Baxter.

What do stuffed dolls have to do with enlightenment? Lots, if you’re into the cult of Amma, known also as Ammachi, Mata Amritanandamayi, and “the hugging saint.”

Amma’s devotees talk to dolls made in her image that are sold on Amma retreats. They tell the doll their problems, seek its comfort, and listen in their minds for its advice. Amma calls the devotees her children, and clucks syllables like baby talk into their ear in her trademark ritual of lining people up, watching them kneel before her, then embracing them.

She tells them she is their mother and that she hears their prayers. She says she’d no more charge them for her darshan (i.e., being in her presence) than a mother would charge an infant for breast milk. Yet insiders have estimated Amma rakes in upwards of 3 million dollars in a 7-week tour, through donations and sales of items like her toothbrush, fragments of a garment she has sat on, Amma dolls, Amma posters, and books by devotees extolling her divinity.

Devotees believe Amma is a living incarnation of the being they consider the supreme God: Kali in Hindu religion, who is depicted in Indian art wearing a necklace of bloody human skulls and a girdle of severed arms but who somehow translates to devotees as a loving maternal figure. Amma events consist of childlike lectures on Hindu doctrines, Amma blessing water which devotees then drink, hymn singing, worship ceremonies, and the hugs. At some events, Amma wears a one-foot-high sparkling crown.

Amma marries people on stage, gives babies their first taste of solid food, tells couples to break up or to stay together, and ordains some of the faithful to abandon their family and live as monks in her ashram. Amma teaches that love is all we need, and it is her divine love that will save us.

In Seattle a couple of months ago, she predicted nuclear war and that no child younger than 5 will live to adulthood after the year 2012. After spreading fear and despair through such prophecies, she announced that only meditation and self-effacing acts of charity can possibly mitigate the sentence for humanity. “Meditation” means mantra/obeisance meditation to the divine mother. Self-effacing charity means donations to her organization and service to her cause.

At public sessions, devotees chant hymns to Amma that grow in volume and frenetic intensity, gesticulating in unison with their arms in the shape of an arc, from their midsection up and out towards Amma, who sits on a dais in front of them. The words of the chant are “Aum Parashaktyai Namah.” That translates to “I bow down/ pay homage to the Supreme Mother of the Universe.” The arm gesture is body language for surrendering one’s soul to Kali in the form Amma, her living embodiment.

I am one of the moderators of the Ex-Amma Forum, a place where people who’ve left the Amma cult come together to help each other heal from their ordeal. The group is open to ex-followers, questioning devotees, concerned family and friends of devotees, and people seeking more information. I became involved with the forum when I watched a close friend of mine grow farther and farther away from the person he once was, the deeper he sank into Amma’s hypnotic embrace. On the forum, I’ve read hundreds of first-person accounts of what people experience with Amma, the side of her no one wants to talk about.

I’ve seen an email from her former joint-secretary alleging she cooks the books, that the money she gathers for charity doesn’t go to the charities she claims. I’ve read accounts by her former monks of the unexplained wealth of Amma’s family, how her charity hospitals won’t take the very poor because the poor don’t have money enough for treatment. I’ve read about“suicides”and unexplained deaths of ashram devotees. So many dead bodies have appeared in the waters outside the ashram that The Indian Express, New Delhi’s daily newspaper, printed an account of local citizens demanding a police investigation into the matter.

I’ve read of alleged organ selling and newspaper reports of beatings. I saw a video of Amma performing a puja (worship ceremony) to a portrait of Sai Baba, the guru who gives penis massages to his favorite boy disciples. I read a letter from a former Amma monk alleging he was told by an Indian holy man not to share what he knows about Amma if he values his safety.

Amma’s website sells pujas performed on behalf of the paying devotee for prices ranging from $30 to $250. We read there an explanation of what happens in Kali puja, which is performed “on Amma’s birthstar”:

“The puja is offered to a lamp representing the Goddess… The puja starts with a worship of the Guru… The central aspect of the puja is the symbolic offering of the five elements of creation to God. Our body is composed from these five elements… The puja symbolizes the surrender of the devotee to God… Each element is represented by a material symbol, such as flowers, or fire… These are offered at the foot of the lighted lamp. The desire of the devotee to offer his or her surrender is effected by these symbolic offerings. During the entire puja the temple resonates with the continuous chanting of the holy names of Kali.” (emphasis mine)

Amma’s PR is impeccable. She presents as “the hugging saint,” a portrait of sweetness and universal love, and the media promotes her unquestioningly as such. There has never been an investigation into her movement, the dead bodies, where the money goes, or what is really happening in her hospitals and orphanages in India.

In July, 2005, the United Nations awarded Amma with “Special U.N. Consultative Status,” according to her website. She is one of 25 core leaders in the United Nations Parliament of World Religions. Her website contains over a dozen pages extolling the humanitarian work of the U.N. One page compares the U.N.’s “Millenium Goals” with Amma’s goals, which are word-for-word identical. (Click here to view both documents.)

The ashram is among 30 Indian NGO’s to receive formal U.N. affiliation, according to Amma’s website. “This will provide opportunities for joint collaboration” between the U.N. and her organization, it goes on to state. Amma’s website openly extols the U.N. for its advances toward global government:

“The United Nations has been in the forefront of tackling problems as they take on an international dimension, providing the legal framework for regulating the use of the oceans, protecting the environment, regulating migrant labor, curbing drug trafficking and combating terrorism, to mention a few. This work continues today, with the United Nations providing input into the trend towards a greater centrality of international law ingoverning interaction across a wide spectrum of issues.” (emphasis mine)

Pulling all this together, what are we seeing here? Amma is a globalist, working intimately with the U.N. to bring about its agenda. That agenda is world regulation and control – a wolf that hides in the sheep’s clothing of humanitarian ideals. The U.N.’s aim is a global Orweillian state held in place by a world bank, a centrally controlled media, a world “peace-keeping unit” (world army), technological surveillance, and control of the world’s water, food, and other life-essential resources.

As one of the 25 core leaders in the U.N.’s religion parliament, Amma supports and promotes these “Big Brother” goals. For anyone wondering if the efforts by the global elite to create a New World Order have a spiritual component, Amma provides ample evidence.

My earlier articles in the “Blowing the Whistle on Enlightenment” series explain the real meaning of the kind of surrender that Amma and other Indian gurus promote among their followers. It is surrender of the personal self to the gods, whom Amma calls “the Lord.” Amma’s hugs, her relics, her blessed water and food, are ways of infusing her energy signature into the minds and bodies of those who visit her, be they devotees or unsuspecting guests. Not only her energy signature but, I submit, the energy signature of the astral entities who work through her, who call themselves gods, and who feed on the psyches of mankind.

Amma’s energy transfer helps devotees entrain with her vibration and meld their minds and souls with “the godhead.” In other words, it helps them become assimilated, or possessed by the same “cosmic” forces that possess and work through Amma. Gurus call such a change in consciousness “attaining enlightenment” or “liberation.” It’s a state of “ego death,” where one no longer functions as an independent individual but as a receptacle of “the Supreme Consciousness.” Translation: as a tentacle of the astral entities who live off human worship and suffering.

What makes Amma both so successful and so sinister is the loving image she hides behind. The media uses it to promote her far and wide. If it seems remarkable that no investigative reporting has been done, that no one from the mainstream media has questioned Amma’s PR, the mystery evaporates when we recall who the mainstream media is run by these days.

Large corporations have bought and own our press and television, and dictate the “news” that journalists are permitted to report. Behind those corporations, as behind our governments, lurk the privileged aristocracy, who control both news and world events by means of puppets who do their bidding. Our world leaders, the mainstream media, and “the saint” Amma work in tandem. That’s why the media and world leaders sing her praises.

Why do I single out Amma among the dozens of gurus I could write about? Because she is so popular, and so unquestioned. Even that guru-busting website, Guruphiliac, seems to miss the shadiness of Amma, voting her the “least bad” of the gurus. But Amma is one of the worst. Powerful and successful, she ropes in new recruits by the thousands on her yearly worldwide tours. Amma’s movement claims that the “saint” has hugged over 26-million people – people who often return as devotees, worshipping her godhood and donating to her coffers.

Amma’s brand of religion is a return to the infantile. She makes babies of grown men and women, giving them dolls to babble to and telling them she’s their mother. While speaking fine words about “the God within each of us,” her actions teach something different. Allowing people to pray to you, kneel to you, and worship you as God Incarnate is not the behavior of someone who wants people to recognize themselves as magnificent, powerful expressions of God.

Amma’s disciples get their power from hugs, dolls, mantra obeisance, and the group euphoria of retreats, not from the core of their own being. They’re conditioned to believe that their inner self is less than the glorious entity before them. They’re told, in fact, that their unique, individual personhood is nothing but a self-serving “ego” – flawed, proud, and devious, something to be destroyed before they can be happy. Every time they bow down to Amma and “the gods” who work through her, Amma’s devotees shut the door more tightly on the divinity within themselves.

It’s a tragedy, but we can stop it: by spreading this information far and wide. When enough people know the other side of Amma, her crown and power will topple. Just as the global government she promotes will crash down about itself when the public sees through the fairy tales.

“The emperor has no clothes.” Pass it on. Once the message ripples through the crowd, the game will be up, and the illusion will be over.

Such beautiful sentiments. Love is the balm that heals the heart, and oneness the reality that joins us. But spiritual teachers with an agenda use “love” and “oneness” teachings to keep the lid down on their disciples’ spiritual development.

Let’s look at these teachings one at a time and see how they are used to manipulate. When a teacher or religion preaches love, at first glance that seems to be a good thing. It encourages people to be selfless and to help their fellows. Because of “love” teachings, religious people give to the poor, volunteer their time, and bite their tongue a lot. They say “the right thing” and don’t do things that other people won’t like. They put their desires on the backburner and focus instead on doing what they think will make others happy. Whenever sentiments of discontent or rebellion arise, they quash them with the stern heel of conscience. They know such feelings are from the dark side, and that they must be vigilant against them.

Years go by, and these well-meaning people become frustrated and repressed. The rebellion in them grows, because they are not listening to themselves. Their soul cries out for experiences, for learning through experience, but they have been taught that personal desires are selfish, so the cries of their soul go unheeded. They grow depressed or angry, because their purpose of embodiment in human form has been thwarted. The frustration comes out in many negative ways: short-temperedness, jealousy, vindictiveness, gossip, judgmentalness.

The sincere people who faithfully follow “love” teachings typically live in a box with the lid down, able to express but little of themselves because instinctual wants are considered suspect or evil. Repressed, their souls turn miserable or spiteful, like a dog chained for years to a stake. “See, it’s a bad dog,” people say when the animal snarls and nips, convinced by such nasty behavior that they were right in chaining that animal all along.

Telling people to be unselfish creates a shadow personality inside them, the very “ego” that religions decry and that wouldn’t exist without religion. It’s ego, teachers preach, that makes the spirit discontent and rebellious. The vices their followers find in their private hearts are proof that the soul is a tainted thing, needing to be risen above or controlled.

So people redouble their efforts to be kind and loving. They volunteer more time, give more money to their church or their guru, and bite their tongue so hard that it hurts. But their “wicked” spirit only becomes sulkier, their negative thoughts stronger, their suppressed rage greater.

The spiritual teacher has, of course, the solution to all this. The Christian struggling with wicked thoughts is told to surrender his soul to Jesus. The disciple plagued by negativity is told to surrender her ego to Oneness Consciousness. It amounts to the same thing. Spiritual aspirants must make an oblation of the will (the soul’s chief attribute and mode of expression) to something perceived as greater and purer than themselves. If they do this, God, they are promised, will destroy the evil in their hearts. Oneness, or Brahman Consciousness, will dissolve their selfish cravings and negative mental chatter. The soul will melt away into the wholeness that is their true cosmic nature, or into the love that is Jesus. The troublesome entity they have fought with for years, their inner self, will be gone. In its place will come a peace that surpasseth understanding, the presence of the Divine alive in their heart.

People who succeed in going the final steps to such surrender do indeed experience peace, but it is the peace of spiritual death. Gone is the cry of their spirit for expression, for freedom to live and do things in the world. Gone is the frustration of the heart that lived in a box all its life. All noise is silenced. The soul has been snuffed out. All that exists in the shell called the body is the presence of something else: a new, “holy” or “cosmic” consciousness.

The consciousness that takes over when we surrender our souls only claims to be divine or of the Source. It is a consciousness that hates life, that abhors uniqueness and diversity. It wants to wipe out the creative spark whose expression was the purpose of creation. That spark, individual consciousness, burst forth from the Source Consciousness in a brilliant firework display at the beginning of time. We are those sparks, children of the Infinite, and our play and display is the reason for the world.

The play has been thwarted for millenniums. The display has been forbidden. Any original impulses that don’t align with institutionalized spiritual programming, in religions of East or West, are judged egoistic or evil. While a few people in society break free from these fetters (becoming our artists, our inventors, our thinkers), most of mankind lives under the yoke of spiritual repression, judging their deepest instincts as suspect, selfish, and wrong.

So we live in miserable marriages, work at miserable jobs, go places we don’t want to go for the “happiness” of our families, and do things we don’t want to do to help the less fortunate. Religious people work so hard to make sure everyone else is happy, but no one does anything that makes anyone happy, because happiness is a luxury they’re told they have no right to expect or experience.

I remember as a girl, how Sundays my family would sit around asking one another how they’d like to spend the day. “Would you like to go to the park?” one person would ask. “I don’t know, would you like to go to the park?” would come the reply. Everyone was so busy being unselfish, trying to do what the others supposedly wanted, that no one ever answered honestly about what they thought would be fun. So we went to the park or museum, never knowing if even one family member really wanted to go there. We were that intent on being good Christians, on sacrificing our personal desires for the sake of everyone else. We thought that made us moral and pleasing to God.

I often think of this sad and ridiculous scenario that was acted out so many times when I was growing up, and what a metaphor it is for all decisions that are based on repressing our inner spark for the supposed higher good. What if instead we all listened to the promptings in our hearts, without judgment? What if we stopped calling those promptings “ego” and considered them messages from the divine within us, messages there to guide us through life?

Those who have succumbed to the teaching that the ego is a self-serving, antisocial, anti-spiritual entity that lives inside waiting to undermine, can never free the creative spark and do the things that truly bring happiness to themselves and to others. When we trust our desires and stop judging them as selfish, the nastiness that once accrued to our inner spirit strangely disappears. The soul isn’t repressed anymore. It is free and expressing, fulfilling its divine promptings. Gone is its envy toward others, its anger and resentment. The soul fills with its own innate joy, and wishes no less for everybody else.

Egoism and evil are not born of this entity; they are born of repressing this entity. Left to itself, unjudged and uncensored, the soul desires good things for itself and for all creation. So where is the selfishness?

Spiritual teachers tell us to love, but true love is never born of an edict. Love is not biting your tongue, doing what someone else wants, repressing your desires, giving money to charity or doing prescribed service. All those things come from an effort at love, not from having love. When you have love, you need no mandates. Love is a tenderness of feeling, an empathy to what another is going through, a perception of the beauty in another.

Not only is a mandate not needed for real love – a mandate is useless in bringing love about. How can a spiritual rule make you feel tenderness or empathy, or appreciation of beauty? Only an open soul can experience those things. A soul shrouded in judgment of itself as egoistic and selfish cannot feel tenderness, empathy or appreciation. It is way too hurt and closed for such delicate feelings. Expecting a judged soul to bloom forth in genuine love is like expecting a seedling you poured drain cleaner on, to sprout forth in beautiful, new, green shoots.

Any spiritual leader who makes love the core of their teaching or who talks of dissolving the “small self” or “ego” leads mankind further into the dark. A truly awake person knows that love cannot be achieved through effort and that egoism is the product of self-flagellation. The truly awake don’t tell people to be loving, they suggest people be true to themselves. They advise self-trust. They are also aware of the nature of religion and its destructive role in the world. They speak out against it in all its forms.

Truly spiritual people recognize that religions use teachings of love and oneness to manipulate humanity into first judging and then surrendering their precious, unique souls (in the form of their will). They perceive that someone stands to gain from this, those who stand at the top of religions, those who call themselves God, gods, or gurus. They know that the true God, the Source Consciousness, has no need for worship and never mandated such. They know that anyone asking for adulation is less than Infinite, less than divine – an imposter pretending to be those things.

The truly aware know that Source Consciousness wants only that its purpose in creation be fulfilled: the play and display of happiness, in a myriad expression of souls, unique in their wonderful forms. They know that religion’s teachings of mandated love and dissolving ego thwart the Infinite’s purpose by destroying those souls.

People who know the truth encourage free expression, independence, individuality. They cheer for things like questioning, dissent, and nonconformity. They never codify “truth” and they never set themselves up as “teachers.” They don’t allow others to put them on a pedestal. They don’t appear on the rolls of “the holy” or “the Self-realized.” They are simple, confident people going about their lives with the light on inside.

No one turns to them as gurus or quotes them as spiritual authorities. They bring light to the world by being who they are and living freely and differently. Their joy and originality inspire those around them to re-evaluate the shrunken, judged personhood inside themselves, to consider whether it, too, might be capable of such luminosity. The truly awake inspire envy and anger in many, whose first reaction to the possibility of freedom is outrage, because it means they may have been traveling in the wrong direction all their lives.

Love is the sweetest expression of life, the flower of God’s creation. Oneness is our deepest nature, the place we all join with God (to quote the poet, Matthew Arnold) like islands “linking (our) coral arms beneath the sea.” Love and Oneness – what could be better?

But teachings that tell us to practice love and to surrender to Oneness are quite another thing. There are those who would twist mankind’s natural spiritual instincts to serve their sinister purposes. Love and Oneness are their calling cards.

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It’s the nature of those who love truth to find it. Truth is more important to them than comfort zones or any material thing. Truth seekers are on the lookout for cracks in their world, sensing that where inconsistency is found, a deeper truth lies beneath, waiting to be discovered. The sincere researcher doesn’t only apply this attitude to things he hears from identified deceivers. He applies it impartially to his own beliefs and those of people he respects.

On the morning of 9/11, I remember sitting in front of my TV as news reporters announced that two different people onboard the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania reported by cell phone to their loved ones that they heard an explosion then saw (through the window) smoke coming out of the side of the plane. These passenger reports happened right before communication went dead.

This story was on the air for just a few minutes, then the smoke and explosion were never mentioned again, as if the report had never existed. If indeed there was an explosion and smoke, that indicates something very different happened than the official story. Was the plane shot down? Did the powers-that-be bury this news report to hide that? This is an example of truth shining through the cracks, revealing itself through the discrepancies.

Liars can’t help revealing truths alongside their deceptions. David Icke, in one of his books, quotes someone as saying that America is like a man with an unfaithful wife who can’t admit the truth of what she is doing. All the clues are there, but the man won’t let himself see.

Building on this analogy, truth seekers are like the husband questioning the unfaithful wife. He knows she’s having an affair, knows she’s answering his questions with lies, but he keeps on questioning because along with the lies, bits of truth inadvertently come out.

Think about the times you’ve had to question a vehemently lying child. Why did you bother, when you knew you were going to get fibs stacked on fibs? Because you knew if you asked enough questions, the right questions, the kid would trip over his own story and spill some or all of the truth.

In the same way, the questioning by the multitudes who are no longer willing to accept the official version of 9/11 and other media fairy tales puts this world’s big-time deceivers under close scrutiny, forcing them to come up with better explanations and new subterfuges. What we glimpse between the contradictory new and old explanations, between the changing masks, is the truth we are looking for.

That’s how a lawyer exposes a liar in court and proves what really occurred: he finds the inconsistencies in the story. The producers of Loose Change have created a new documentary on the death of John F. Kennedy, Junior, presenting a strong argument, through discrepancies in news reports and investigations, that JFK’s son was murdered. The film astutely observes that whenever TV news anchors revise their version of what happened immediately after a major news event, that typically indicates a cover-up and something worth looking into.

A lot of aware people believe that mankind is on the verge of “waking up,” of seeing through all the illusions around us. Is there any foundation for such a belief? There is, if the nature of truth seekers is to expose lie after lie until they discover what’s at the bottom. There is, if the nature of truth is to be known.

It is the nature of truth to be known, if we all have a collective memory of it deep within our consciousness. If on some level all are connected, if we have existed in lifetimes before this, our souls carry a memory of both our personal past and the past of the universe. We carry within us the history of creation, albeit that’s typically an unopened book. Our collective memory must assert itself eventually. It’s already starting to do so. The surprise is, not that we might remember where we came from and how we got here, but that we haven’t known it all along.

Tampering with our minds by fourth-dimensional deceivers (see my previous articles) causes the planet’s collective case of amnesia. But it takes effort for the deception to continue, and anything that must be supported by effort will in time succumb to that which is effortless and natural. Truth is natural. Lies need supported. Truth is self-sustaining. Lies need tireless entities to keep on holding them in place.

By nature, truth bobs to the surface. What happens when a killer tries to hide a corpse? He buries it, and someone finds the disturbed earth. He throws it in the river, and it floats upstream to shore. Truth is like a beach-ball that liars attempt to hold underwater. It will stay down only as long as constant pressure is applied. The moment the liars take a rest, get distracted, or slip up, the truth-ball pops to the surface again. Every time this happens, a few more eyes see it.

To stay ahead of mankind’s emerging awareness, to try and beat the truth in its nature to rise and be known, deceiving leaders are forced to add more truth to the lie-mix each time they create a new political excuse or remodeled spiritual teaching (a point David Icke elucidated in his May 4 newsletter).

We could call this the “yes but” phenomenon. The deceivers concede “yes, that’s true” because a large percentage of the public has seen through some lie they promoted. They then add a “but” and place their spin on the truth they have admitted, forming a new lie, excusing their former deceit, and pushing the truth-bottle down one more time. Icke cites the new book Superclass as an example of this trick. (It was written by one of the global elite, admits the existence of the global elite, then colors the character of the global elite as just a group of guys getting together over the golf course.)

The “yes but” strategy serves an added purpose: it makes deceivers appear like sources that can be trusted. If you bring out enough new insights, which impress or even help people, the public’s more likely to swallow everything you tell them, including the hook beneath your bait.

We see this a lot in new spiritual teachings, which bring out new perspectives on reality. Such teachers give answers that “improve on” understandings that preceded them, and that possibly even unfold more about our history and the nature of reality. But the teachings are laced with the old lies, dressed up in better clothes, that continue keeping disciples from experiencing self-empowerment.

The same strategy of detecting truth behind media or political lies can be applied to popular systems of thought. Religions and spiritual teachings,that lead people to feel ashamed of their “sins” or weighed down by their “egoistic small selves,” demonstrate quick costume changes to keep us from seeing their fundamental flaws.

Modern Indian gurus, for instance, are starting to denounce the caste system, even though it was supported by gurus for centuries and in spite of the fact that Lord Krishna himself, in the Bhagavad-Gita, spoke in defense of it. But gurus are losing customers over this teaching. So now they switch their tune, claiming it was human, ignorant misinterpretation of divine teachings that created the castes. In scripture, the castes were only meant to be symbolic, they tell us. “It’s only symbolic” and “human misinterpretation” are the excuse-all explanations that every religion uses to justify its worst historical and scriptural atrocities.

Human awareness has risen to where it will no longer passively tolerate injustices like caste. The questioning of doctrine this leads to could take down Eastern religion, so one dogma is thrown out in order to retain the worshippers. This is not unlike the practice on old ships of tossing the heavy stores overboard, regardless of the value of their contents, if the ship itself threatens to sink.

A recent news article talks about Timothy Ellis, the bishop who is organizing the “U2-charist,” where lyrics by rock-star Bono (along with a pulsating light-show) replace traditional hymns at church services. In explaining the importance to religion of renovating its own façade, Bishop Ellis said, “We need to try new expressions. If we don’t try to update and refresh our thinking, we will die.”

Can we look between the lines (at the cracks) and translate that? Is Ellis really saying that without maintaining dogmas and rituals that appeal, dogmas and rituals that inspire people to surrender their “soma” or “loosh,” those who created religion and feed off its energy fear they might die?

Truth shines through the cracks, in politics, media and religion. It’s useful to question the lying politician and the spiffed-up spiritual teaching because examination reveals much behind the renovations and the tell-tale discrepancies. Eventually you piece together the picture, which the lies can never fully conceal if you look with attention.

When I was a girl, my father was a repetitive joke teller: one of those males from the World War II generation who liked canned jokes and was always button-holing people to listen. I routinely tuned him out when he did this, but two of his anecdotes have stuck with me through my life. I think it’s because of their wisdom.

The first is a joke every reader born before 1970 will groan at in recognition:

“What did the little optimist say when he woke up on his birthday to find a cartload of manure dumped in front of his porch steps?

“There’s got to be a pony here somewhere!’”

Submerged in the corniness, there’s something about that child, confidently looking for his pony, that makes us smile. He reminds us of the part of ourselves that’s determined to find the good underneath all the garbage in this world, the part that believes that goodness, not indifference, has to be the ultimate reality. The joke also reminds us of our confidence that we can and will find the truth. We routinely piece and pick through the horse-shit, the propaganda of our leaders, in an effort to find the pony. We know we’ll get to it if we look long enough.

The second joke, which I’ll end with, demonstrates the zeal for knowledge that refuses to accept defeat, that attempts to learn and solve things even in the face of utter failure. Maybe the two characters in this second anecdote never meet the fate that seems in store for them. Maybe they’ll remain forever suspended, making us smile and inspiring us:

A pilot in a small plane suddenly loses engine power. The plane starts to dive, and the pilot parachutes out. After falling away from the plane some distance, he tugs on his rip cord. Nothing happens. He tugs again. Nothing. The ground looms closer and closer.

Did you ever wonder why a good God would build a world where the only way to survive is by taking life? How long would you stay alive if you refused to eat? You may love animals and grow plants inside your home and flowers in your garden, but every time you eat, you destroy the life of something. A something with a consciousness, that feels and desires to live, as we do.

The other day I grabbed an onion from a basket to chop up, and I saw it had sprouted a beautiful, tender, light-green shoot. It had a life inside it, a consciousness that wanted to take root, breathe air and thrive. Any tears in chopping that onion did not come from the fumes.

I’m not a sentimentalist. I’m a person questioning, increasingly aware of an insidious thread woven through biological life. We are born, we feed, and we die. Life is a process of consuming other living things in order to stay alive as long as possible until death in turn consumes us. We tell ourselves life is a whole lot more, but it’s reduced to that as long as we must feed to survive. If we can’t stay alive more than a few months without food, how can eating not be fundamental to how we define our existence?

Eating is a requirement for biological life as we know it. It’s the thread that holds together material existence. More than a thread, it’s a chain, binding us to the law that we must consume each other. Rebelling is punishable by death.

What kind of God or gods would create a world predicated on killing? We don’t like to ask that, and we find every excuse to avoid looking at this question. But every time a dear one dies, or you find a nibbled bird in the yard destroyed by an idle cat, or you read about an animal that has suffered mercilessly, or another molested child, or a nation ravaged by a quake that’s buried thousands of living people, your mind goes back to that nagging question. Who would make a world like this? Was it truly a God of love?

According to much evidence, it wasn’t. The world was created by something else. Or if it was created by the loving God our hearts insist exists, then creation has been tampered with by someone else so merciless that it barely resembles the original divine vision. The biological universe is controlled by the law that to live we must take life or die. That is sinister. Something there is that makes us have to eat, that makes us age and disintegrate. This is the “something wrong with the world,” the crack in the universe. Knowledge of it works “like a splinter in the mind, driving you mad,” quoting “The Matrix.” Yet awakening to the truth of our predicament is the first step toward radical change. Only radical change can possibly right the fundamental flaw woven into physical creation.

And how well-woven it is. Not only does violence wind through the lives of all Earth life like the fibers of a time-bomb attached to a victim. It reaches out into space, where supernovas implode, collapsing millions of stars along with all living beings on all their attendant planets. Death and devouring are so pervasive most people can’t conceive of a world without them, or if they can conceive it, they label the concept preposterous. Yet quantum physics shows that matter is nothing but atoms: emptiness vibrating. Emptiness does not die and neither does the energy it oscillates. So why must bodies die that are made of up of these things?

Robert Monroe, in his book “Far Journeys,” writes of contact he had with a light being in an out-of-body experience. (Monroe is arguably the world’s foremost researcher on OBEs; he started an institute with trainee/researchers to scientifically investigate the phenomenon.) Reportedly the light being told Monroe that when humans die, their energy is released and harvested by trans-dimensional beings, who use it to extend their own life spans. The claim is that the universe is a garden created by these beings as their food source.

According to Monroe’s story, animals are intentionally positioned on this planet to feed on plants and on each other, thereby releasing the life force of their victims so it can be harvested. In a predator-prey struggle, exceptional energy is produced in the combatants. The spilling of blood in a fight-to-the-death conflict releases this intense energy, which the light beings call “loosh.” Loosh is also harvested from the loneliness of animals and humans, as well as from the emotions engendered when a parent is forced to defend the life of its young. Another source of loosh is humans’ worship.

According to Monroe’s informant, our creators, the cosmic “energy farmers,” intentionally equipped animals with devices like fangs, claws and super-speed in order to prolong predator-prey combat and thereby produce more loosh. In other words, the greater the suffering, the more life force is spewed from our bodies, and the tastier the energy meal for our creators.

This story told to Monroe (which threw him into a two-week depression) corresponds to reports in some of the world’s oldest scriptures, the Vedas, Upanishads, and Puranas of India. There we read that “the universe is upheld by sacrifice” (Atharva Veda) and that “all who are living (in this world) are the sacrificers. There is none living who does not perform yagya (sacrifice). This body is (created) for sacrifice, and arises out of sacrifice and changes according to sacrifice.” (Garbha Upanishad)

Again:

“(Death as the Creator) resolved to devour all that he had created; for he eats all. . . He is the eater of the whole universe; this whole universe is his food.” (Mahabharata)

In the writings of Carlos Castaneda, who chronicles the life and teachings of a Yaquii sorcerer called Don Juan, we find another story of the Divine devouring humans, in this case human consciousness. Reports Castaneda:

“The Eagle is devouring the awareness of all the creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have floated to the Eagle’s beak, like a ceaseless swarm of fireflies, to meet their owner, their reason for having had life. The Eagle disentangles these tiny flames, lays them flat, as a tanner stretches out a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle’s food. The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things, reflects equally and at once all those living things.” (“The Eagle’s Gift,” by Carlos Castaneda)

The idea that man must sacrifice (must kill something or be killed in order to appease the gods) is apparently intrinsic to all the world’s root religions. We find blood ritual, including human sacrifice, in the Druidic tradition, Tibetan Buddhism, among the Indians of the Americas, in Greece and Rome, Africa, China, Arabia, Germany, Phoenicia and Egypt. Even the Old Testament (Judges 11:31-40) has a little-advertised story of human sacrifice, with the Israelite judge Jephthah ritually slaughtering his own daughter to fulfill a vow he made to Jehovah.

While we may not think of Judaism as typically promoting human sacrifice, it more than promoted it if we count the genocide Jehovah demanded of the Hebrews. In one day alone, they murdered 12,000 Canaanites “and utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey with the edge of the sword.”(Joshua: 6:21)

In Islam, the situation is similar. Allah, while paying lip service to the immorality of human sacrifice, orders his servants in the Koran to practice jihad against all unbelievers. “When the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war.” (Koran: 9:5)

Peace-loving Moslems interpret such passages as “symbolic” in their desire to justify their faith, much as Christians try to justify Jehovah’s sociopathic behavior with excuses. In many ways, the god of Islam reasons and rants like the god of the Israelites. Could it be the same entity? It isn’t contradictory that he would support two separate peoples, then lead them to fight each other. Not if his agenda is to stimulate and harvest plenty of loosh.

Christianity, the religion of brotherly love, is implicated in blood sacrifice by being rooted in the Jewish tradition. The Bible declares Jesus is the son of God (Jehovah), and Jehovah announces at Jesus’ baptism, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.” (Matthew: 17:5) Where was Jesus when his father was slaughtering the Canaanites? Jesus himself becomes a blood sacrifice, a fact that Catholics reenact in the mass and that Protestants bathe themselves in to be “saved.” Christians are no strangers to sacrifice.

If suffering and death were part of creation that no one, including the gods, could help, there’d be some reason to be more forgiving. I might even buy the story that they need us to support them with our homage and we need them to keep the universe running. But when you add blood sacrifice into the equation, I abandon ship. It’s one thing if the gods can’t prevent earthly suffering and death – quite another if they seek it out and thrive from it – or worse yet, created it. And that’s what blood sacrifice, and the scriptures around it, indicate.

When the oldest scriptures of the world tell us we were created as food for the gods, I have to ask myself if I want to live in a universe where that might be true. The fact is, I don’t. I can no longer give my approval to that kind of reality. So if I won’t live with it, I have to come up with something better. I have to find something more fundamental than the physical universe to locate my identity in, and my power in. I sense, as many do these days, that there’s something beyond the universe as it has been presented to us, something outside this box, outside this system. That’s what I seek to know, connect with, and draw from.

Robert Morning Sky, a truth seeker of the Hopi and Apache traditions, tells a story he learned from his people about a race of beings who knew no limitations, who existed far outside this physical universe. One day one of them declared his intention to visit Earth and take on a body just for the adventure of it, for the experience. His friends cautioned him, as this universe had a reputation as amnesia-producing, a place of no return. But the entity laughed that off and promised to come back after one lifetime.

Centuries passed, and the entity never came home. One of his comrades decided to enter the physical world to go look for his friend. He promised not to get lost in matter and to return with the other individual. More centuries passed, and neither being returned. So another immortal entered physical mass, and he also never came back. In time many members of these unlimited beings incarnated in human form, and the story goes, none of them yet has gone home.

Maybe we are those people, starting to remember who we are. Maybe it’s time to break out of the hypnosis we’ve lived under for eons, the unquestioned assumptions that we must kill and eat, suffer and die, live in lack and sadness, and undergo all the human drama as it has been defined for us.

Is it insane to think that humans can beat the system? That we could make a choice to stop the activities that supply our up-line with fuel? That we could minimize – even stop – our own refueling from the life force of creatures lower than us on the food chain? Is it madness to think that our bodies, made of undying energy, could themselves not have to die, that we might learn to live on the power of infinite consciousness, which we can access within ourselves, being part of it?

While some may call that madness, I prefer it to the world I see around me. I certainly prefer it to death. I prefer it to loss of my dear ones, and to sickness and poverty. The greatest experiment mankind can engage in is mastery of the principles of freedom, creation, abundance, and immortality. We’re wearing body suits that in 70-some years of use are programmed to self-destruct. What could be more important than changing that programming?

In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna warns: “He who does not follow the wheel thus set revolving lives in vain.” The wheel is the cycle of birth and death, karma and retribution, human sacrifice and divine blessing. To rebel against this system is to fail in our life purpose as defined by those who say they are our creators and gods. But surely life was meant to be more than dinner for the next rung up on the food chain. If “living in vain” means breaking out of that, I’m all for that kind of failure.

It’s only far-fetched if you believe two things: that humans are the end of the food chain and that all there is of reality is perceivable by the human senses.

Why would humans be the end of the food chain? Why would we assume the buck stops here?

Isn’t it somewhat arrogant to assume that something can’t exist just because our eyes can’t see it? That’s a little like the ostrich believing an approaching enemy has ceased to exist because when her head is stuck in the sand, the predator is invisible.

The human eye perceives only a small frequency range of the known electro-magnetic spectrum. We have no first-hand perception of anything that may exist in the ranges of infrared, x-ray, gamma ray, ultraviolet, or bands of energy beyond those that we aren’t even aware of. It’s ethnocentric to think life exists only within the range of visible light. That’s rather like saying you can’t believe life could exist on the trillions of other planets, that life is unique to Earth (just because you this is where you happen to live).

But back to the food-chain. The scriptures of every religion say, virtually or literally, that God/ the gods need humans for food. Every religion I’ve researched historically required blood sacrifice, including human sacrifice. Jehovah, in Leviticus, speaks of “the aroma of the sacrifice” being pleasing to God. I suggest that “aroma” is the suffering of the victim. While Jehovah did not require human sacrifice on a physical alter, he ordered the Jews to slay tens of thousands of men, women and children (plus all the people’s livestock) in bloody forrays, that included, at the high point, a second circumcision of the Jewish people. Spilled blood nourishes “the divine.”

The energy in blood is equated with the life force in Chinese medicine: the flow of the Chi is the flow of the blood. Blood sacrifice is required by the gods of every religion because spilling blood is releasing the Chi, the life energy, which they then can assimilate.

Soma is another form (other than blood) that the life force takes, and this, too, is courted by the gods. Maharishi explained Soma as the “ambrosia” or “nectar of the gods” generated in the body during meditation. According to Indian scriptures, it is also engendered through other forms of worship. The gods consume the sacrifice and the gods consume worship as well. Both transfer life energy from the physical dimension to entities dwelling in frequencies beyond the range of visible light.

The only way to call this “far-fetched” is to dismiss every scripture of every culture that’s ever been written as nonsense. You’d also have to trivialize all the evidence of possession and mental illness that exists, and all evidence of psychic phenomena. I realize some people do that, but to me it’s the ostrich again, afraid of looking at what’s going on around us and dealing with it.

·“TM works and you know it, or you wouldn’t have done it all those years. I think you’re just bitter.”

If it works, then why am I bitter? What would I have to be bitter about?

I don’t deny I felt benefits from TM in the beginning. It’s what kept me hanging on so many years. But in time I came to see that the initial pure consciousness TM gave me tastes of was being usurped by something else that was eating up my soul. I was losing “me.”

I had a healthy sense of personal self and recognized the subsuming of it as something negative, so I got out. Some of my dearest friends still see losing “the ego” as spiritual progress, and are tightly caught in the jaws of the invisible beast. There is little left of the people they used to be. They’ve been largely “assimilated.” I hope to help them see this someday and, in seeing, make a willful choice that cuts their link with the devic marauders and reclaims their lost personhood. An intentional rescinding of permission will free them. These friends are one big reason I do this writing.

·“I also quit TM and agree with most of what you write, but I never felt drained from meditation.”

That’s not surprising. How much you notice the siphoning depends largely on how much energy or life force you had to begin with. A farmer milking a cow can’t deplete it too badly, or it won’t provide milk. If you trim a plant down to the nubbins, it may not grow again. Likewise, “the gods” don’t take so much life force or Soma away that it is grossly noticeable in most cases. But the milking is real – it’s even discussed in the scriptures.

People who meditate many hours a day over a period of years (advanced meditators) are the ones most likely to notice negative changes in their lives. If they weren’t very strong to begin with, the life force depletion shows up over time as physical ailments and other maladies. I know one woman who used to be slightly eccentric when we were meditators together 20-plus years ago. As she continued to meditate, she became full-fledged psychotic. Now she spends her life in and out of mental hospitals. This is an example of how weaker people suffer most from the psychic predation.

People with strong, healthy egos are less likely to surrender their individuality to the gods, in spite of mantra-meditating for years. Such people are more or less “failures” in terms of Indianism standards: they don’t reach that “cosmic” state meditators yearn for, but neither do they transmogrify into zombies. Their strong sense of personal self protects them from being psychologically assimilated.

Assimilation, even more than energy siphoning, is the primary danger I perceive in mantra meditation and Eastern religion. It is also, I expect, the real purpose behind mantra meditation.

When a meditator relinquishes the authorship of action and ceases to identify with his thoughts and desires, he thinks he has reached oneness with the Infinite. In reality, he has abdicated his personhood and placed it on the “freebie shelf,” where outside entities are entitled to pick it up and work through it as their instrument. He now channels their will into this world, having given away personal rights to his body, heart and mind. This is called possession, in my book, and it accounts for the other-worldy charisma of “the enlightened.”

An apparently Asian woman who blogs under the name “FactsandTruth” has put up a mind-blowing website which she claims tells the real story of Tibet. The site is full of photos of the Dalai Lama smiling with famous Nazi leaders, and videos and articles on the history of Tibet that turn the Western perspective upside-down.

Before the Communist revolution, these sources allege, Tibetan power was in the hands of the wealthy ruling class, which consisted of the lamas and the landed aristocracy, while 95 % of the people lived as slaves and serfs. Little boys were conscripted into service as monks when volunteers were in short supply, and slaves were executed by owners who would give their dead bodies to lamas in exchange for the Dalai Lama’s blessing. The monks would allegedly strip these bodies of skin, long bones, liver and heart which they used in their rituals. The website further alleges that the story we’re hearing in the West is propaganda spun by our media in partnership with the CIA agenda which has supported the Dalai Lama all along.

So who is lying, and how do we tell? And why, if Bronte Baxter is so smart, did she make a lot of hoopla about the glorious freedom movement in Tibet when there’s serious reason to suspect it may be snickering behind its hand at us along with our favorite bad guys?

The last question first. Yours truly Bronte Baxter spoke from limited knowledge. I based my opinion on a smattering of experience and didn’t look deeply enough into the story before taking a position. Or rather, more charitably, I took a sincere position which now turns out to probably be wrong. There’s something to be learned here.

There’s always another side to every story, and beneath both sides there is usually a third. No one has a corner on truth. Not you, not I, not even those we most respect and admire. Any of us are, at best, thoughtful people observing what’s around us and calling it as we see it in an effort to live freely and honorably. But how tempting it is to defend our initial positions from the onslaught of incoming evidence! To become attached to looking good or to being certain and right. But if we pick certitude and image over our search for the truth, we fail ourselves in the deepest way possible.

I once heard an incredible man named Robert Morning Sky remark that to have integrity we must be willing “to follow the trail of truth wherever it may lead, at whatever the cost to me or my opinions.” It’s one thing to say, “Oh yes, I live that way,” quite another to do it. But if we don’t do it, if we don’t consider the uncomfortable opinion and question our own assumptions, we are ourselves dogmatists, sitting fat and happy inside our sorry fortresses of self-delusion.

We can’t afford to follow people anymore. Look at where it got us. We have to follow the facts, guided by gut instincts. When a trail turns cold, we have to abandon it, then pick up the scent again as quickly as we can. In doing this, we come to trust each other, fellow explorers finding their way through the woods. If someone climbs a tree today and gets a glimpse of the world from the top of the forest, we cheer him for his report. But tomorrow someone else will be in a different tree shouting down different visions.

No one person should ever become “the leader.” We can’t afford to build new hierarchies. That’s what corrupted this world, with a few elite and powerful exploiting the rest of us. Everyone has the Infinite whispering in their hearts. Let us make that our collective leader.

But back to Tibet. Who’s telling the truth? The Chinese Communists or the American media? The monks I heard speak at the Tibetan performance I wrote about, who may have been misled in their innocence? Maybe the short Tibetan man who used to work in the lunchroom near my office, who passionately spoke of genocide in the country he had to leave. But was he a former serf or aristocracy?

I know a German woman with a Ph.D. whose special research interest is the Third Reich. She told me once about Hitler sending a radio as a gift to the Dalai Lama during the Second World War. A Nazi emissary carried it for days over the snow-covered passes to get it to its Lassa destination. I was chillingly reminded of that when I read Dalai Lama’s alleged Nazi connections on FactandTruth’s website.

Is it really possible that a man and a religion that preach compassion and kindness could be pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes? Before the Communists came to Tibet, did lamas really conscript little boys to be monks, torture prisoners, enforce a feudal system that consigned most of the population to poverty, and use human organs in sacrificial rituals? Is the Dalai Lama really in bed with the CIA and were the Nazis his friends?

If these things are not true, Tibetan Buddhism may be the only religion on earth not in the back pocket of trans-dimensional entities who feed off human suffering and worship. Is it likely that Tibetan Buddhism is the noble exception? More likely that we were taken in again, in our wish to believe in something good. Goodness is out there — we weren’t wrong about that. But there’s reason to question it behind the Dalai Lama’s smile.